What's Your Rule of Thumb?
A quick way to size up a company's sales team before you ever pick up the phone.
Same building, two different headcount stories — the math changes depending on which side of the wall you're counting.
Every prospecting tool asks you to filter by revenue and employee count. Almost none of them tell you what those numbers actually mean once you're inside a specific industry.
Here's the problem. A $200 million manufacturer and a $200 million distributor can look identical in a database. Same revenue band, similar employee count filter, same little building icon next to the name. But one of them might have 40 people in sales. The other might have 400. If you're trying to find companies with a real, coachable sales team, that difference is the whole ballgame.
Two numbers do the work
The first is revenue per employee. It tells you how labor-intensive the business is. A manufacturer runs $150,000 to $250,000 in revenue per employee, because most of that headcount is on a plant floor. A distributor runs $350,000 to $600,000, because the product moves through the business without much labor attached to it. Same revenue, very different headcount.
The second number is sales as a percentage of total headcount. This is where the real variation shows up. Manufacturing and engineering services usually run 3 to 8 percent. Medical device companies with a direct field sales force run 20 to 30 percent. Distribution runs 15 to 25 percent. A tech company can run higher still once you count the full go-to-market org.
Multiply the two together against a revenue band, and you get a real number instead of a guess.
A rough guide
Vertical | Revenue per employee | Sales % of headcount |
Manufacturing | $150K–$250K | 3–8% |
Engineering / product development services | $150K–$300K | 3–8% |
Medical device (direct sales model) | $250K–$400K | 20–30% |
Technology / SaaS | $250K–$400K | 15–25% |
Industrial / MRO distribution | $350K–$600K | 15–25% |
At $200 million in revenue, that math puts a manufacturer's sales team somewhere around 25 to 50 people. It puts a medical device company's commercial org closer to 100 to 250. Same revenue. Wildly different opportunity, depending on what you're selling into it.
How I actually use it
I don't treat this as gospel. I treat it as a sanity check before I spend an hour building a target list I'll end up throwing away.
Pick the vertical. Look up the ratio. Run the math against the revenue band you care about. If a company's employee count doesn't roughly match what the ratio predicts, that's not noise, that's a signal. Maybe the company is unusually automated. Maybe it's distribution-heavy and light on headcount elsewhere. Maybe the database is just wrong, which happens more than any of us would like.
Either way, you find out before the call, not during it.
The tool doesn't know your business. You do. Use the ratio to narrow the field, then use thirty years of judgment, or three, or however many you've got, to do what the spreadsheet never will.
Prospect-Vision helps companies build pipelines, enter new markets, and create revenue growth with the combination of senior BD leadership and AI-powered workflows. If you're building a target list and want a second set of eyes on the math, let's talk.
Tags: Revenue Strategy, Sales Prospecting, B2B Sales, GTM Strategy, ICP
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